2000-08-07 04:00:00 PDT FAR AWAY -- Sir Alec Guinness, 86, the British actor of consummate versatility and aplomb whose roles spanning more than 60 years on stage, screen and television ranged from Hamlet to Obi-Wan Kenobi in "Star Wars," died Saturday at a hospital in England, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Guinness became ill at his home near Petersfield, about 50 miles southwest of London, and was taken by ambulance Thursday to the King Edward VII Hospital, where he died Saturday, said hospital spokeswoman Jenny Masding. The cause of death was not released.

Guinness was adept both at high comedy and stark melodrama, and he had a way of so completely becoming the character he was playing that audiences often forgot he was acting. He was impossible to typecast. Critic Kenneth Tynan once called him "a master of anonymity . . . the whole presence of the man is guarded and evasive."

He won an Academy Award for best actor in 1957 for his role as the rigid and priggish British Army Col. Nicholson, interned in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in "The Bridge on the River Kwai." In 1950, he was voted best actor of the year in Variety magazine's annual poll of New York drama critics for his performance as Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, the urbane and all-knowing psychiatrist in the Broadway version of T.S. Eliot's "The Cocktail Party," a stage role that Guinness created.

But he also was known to millions of admirers around the world for such widely diverse roles as the aging roguish painter, Gully Jimson in the movie, "The Horse's Mouth," for which he also wrote the script from the Joyce Carey novel; the middle-aged secret agent George Smiley in the television miniseries "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy"; the alcoholic Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, in the Broadway play "Dylan"; the wily Prince Feisal in the film "Lawrence of Arabia"; and the galactic sage Obi-Wan Kenobi in "Star Wars."

NONDESCRIPT FEATURES

Bald and slight of stature, with sloped shoulders, Guinness was the antithesis of the popular image of what a leading actor should look like. He had an unmemorable face. "You notice it, or rather fail to notice it, as soon as he enters a room," a London critic once observed.

He was reflective and low key by nature, and he often said he became an actor to escape from himself.

"I've always thought of myself -- not my personal self, but my professional self -- as a kind of blank," he once said. "I try to get inside a character and project him -- one of my own private rules of thumb is that I have not got a character until I have mastered exactly how he walks. . . . It's not sufficient to concentrate on his looks. You have got to know his mind -- to find out what he thinks, how he feels, his background, his mannerisms."

Although he began his stage and screen career in the 1930s, it was not until release of the 1949 British film "Kind Hearts and Coronets" that Guinness became widely known outside the acting community. In the satirical and very funny period film, he played eight characters, all members of an eccentric English family, the d'Ascoynes, who are systematically eliminated by a disinherited ninth member of the family because they stand between him and what he believes to be his rightful inheritance.

Those eight cameo appearances brought Guinness enthusiastic critical acclaim and led to major motion picture roles during the early 1950s. Among them were "The Mudlark," in which he played the 19th century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, and "The Lavender Hill Mob," where he was a low-level, bespectacled and bowler-hatted bank clerk who schemed with an accomplice to smuggle a hoard of gold bullion out of England.

FATHER'S IDENTITY A MYSTERY

Born in London on April 2, 1914, Guinness never discovered who his father was. The name was omitted from the birth certificate, and his mother would not discuss the subject.

When he was still a child, his mother married a Scottish army officer, who is said to have detested and tormented his stepson, and three years later when he was posted to New Zealand, they did not accompany him.

In his 1982 memoirs, "Blessings in Disguise," Guinness acknowledged that being an actor had been his "dream since adolescence." But his schoolmasters discouraged this, and he did not participate in student theatricals until his final year of school, when he was assigned the role of a breathless messenger in "Macbeth." To achieve the proper effect, he ran six times around a nearby playing field immediately before appearing on stage.

Upon completion of his schooling, Guinness went to work as an apprentice copywriter in a London advertising agency, but he quit after 1 1/2 years to study acting. He sought out the acquaintance of the actor John Gielgud, who in 1934 got him the first big break of his career, the parts of Osric and the third player in "Hamlet."

During World War II, he served in the Royal Navy, spending most of his time on convoy duty in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. After his military stint he returned to acting.

It was during the postwar years that Guinness' cinematic career began to soar. He won international acclaim for his chilling portrayal of a Roman Catholic cardinal coerced by his communist captors into false confessions of crimes he did not commit in a 1955 movie, "The Prisoner."

Guinness was made a Commander of the British Empire in 1955 and knighted in 1959. In 1979, he was presented a special Oscar at the Academy Award ceremonies for his screen performances.

His 1977 performance as Obi- Wan Kenobi in "Star Wars" was widely viewed as adding a degree of class to an already spectacular movie, and his characterization of secret agent George Smiley in "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy" was widely hailed as a television tour de force.

In 1938, Guinness married Merula Salaman, an actress he had met when they were both appearing as animals in a Gielgud production of "Noah." They had one son, Matthew.